Get Along With You
by kincaidian
Summary: "Well, those weren't Hidan's exact words," Sasori admitted in a monotone. "Something along the lines of getting it on with the bitches, all day all night, woohoo, that sort of thing. He then tried to tell me some foolproof pickup lines, but Kakuzu ran him through with a tent pole for being too loud." Crack, one-shot. Sasori Deidara friendship.


Deidara knew that the world was going to shit when he woke with a rose jammed in his face.

He responded accordingly by sneezing thrice in violent succession, shoving it away, and swearing efficiently when a thorn dug into his palm, just above the mouth. The removal of garish crimson from his immediate vision revealed Sasori, peering down at him with an expression that was five foot four inches away from actual curiosity.

"What the fuck _was_ that?" Deidara yelled, withdrawing further under the covers when Sasori brandished the rose once more to bring it closer to his face. "Get that thing away from me, yeah!"

"It's a rose," Sasori said calmly. "I'll throw it away if it upsets you, Deidara."

"Burn it," Deidara agreed. Then: "Why is it a rose?"

Sasori paused mid-Katon to give him a look of utmost blankness.

"I mean," Deidara gestured, the mouth on his left palm making a noise like a hissing cat and the one on his right making upset clicking sounds, "why do you have a rose, danna? It's not like it showed up out of nowhere, yeah?"

"Oh." Sasori looked at the offending flower with the thoughtful expression that Deidara associated with everything from immediate and very literal disembowelment to trying to remember Pain's favorite color (it was blue) "Hidan gave it to me. He says that it's conducive to a successful courting experience."

"Courting?" Deidara repeated faintly.

"Well, those weren't his exact words," Sasori admitted. "Something along the lines of getting it on with the bitches, all day all night, woohoo, that sort of thing. He then tried to tell me some foolproof pickup lines, but Kakuzu ran him through with a tent pole for being too loud."

Deidara could only gape, open-mouthed. With all three mouths. The stitches on his chest itched. The only thing he could articulate properly was, "…_pickup lines?"_

Sasori nodded. "He seemed inspired by the fact that most puppets are made of wood. I believe he was planning on drawing a comparison to erections."

With that stellar insight, Sasori strolled away, rose still clutched in one hand.

Deidara stared at the empty doorway for a long time. One of his mouths began humming an awful love ballad from Iwa.

"Shut up," he told his hand, and went to the bathroom.

* * *

After he had brushed his teeth –a feat, even if he did say so himself, that was the height of dexterity and flexibility. Even Kakuzu said that they could probably sell tickets to showcase it- he felt a bit more awake and on top of things.

He wandered downstairs –stepping over Hidan, who was lying in a pool of his blood in the hallway- and found Itachi piling Cocoa Puffs into a bowl.

"Breakfast of champions, yeah!" Deidara remarked with enthusiasm.

Itachi made a point of shaking the box until all it yielded was a poofy mushroom cloud of chocolate powder.

"You're an evil little shit, yeah," Deidara said bitterly. "I hear your dead parents loved your kid brother more than you."

"Which is exactly what your mom said last night," Itachi replied. He checked the date on the milk carton –totally ignoring the Post-It saying THIS IS THE MILK OF LORD PAIN, HANDS OFF- shrugged, and pored a copious amount on his 'Puffs.

"Your _face_-"Deidara began, but Itachi looked up with a hint of red in his eyes and went back to enjoying his breakfast and Deidara, wisely, decided to let it go.

"'Sup?" Zetsu asked when he plonked down on the chair next to him.

"We're out of Cocoa Puffs." He said morosely, glaring at Itachi.

White Zetsu's eye widened, while the other looked bored. "That's _terrible. _If Leader finds out-"

"Finds out what?" Pain asked, taking the seat opposite Deidara.

"-he might get _really upset_," Zetsu continued. "As in, he might go Shinra Tensei little girls in the park!"

"That doesn't sound like Leader, yeah," Deidara said, frowning.

"Exactly!" Pain nodded vehemently.

"It kind of does, though," Konan said, drifting up next to them. "He once used it to push a cat off a fence because it looked at him funny."

There followed a silence, the kind that always came with any of Konan's statements. It had an air of bafflement mixed liberally with reverence.

"Sasori's trying to make a puppet out of a half-burnt rose," Konan added, looking serenely at Deidara. "I think he's fitting a senbon into the stem."

"Shit monkeys," Deidara said, heartfelt.

"That sucks," Itachi offered. "Coincidentally, that's also what your mom did."

"Your decimated clan," Deidara retorted angrily, "is crying over the travesty you call your face, yeah."

"_Your_ face-"

"Children," Pain said loudly.

"-launched a thousand ships, I know," Deidara leered at Itachi.

"Stop fighting," Pain commanded.

"In the opposite direction," Itachi told Deidara. "Screaming."

"Well, at least I didn't-"

"Where are my motherfucking Cocoa Puffs?" Pain interrupted.

Deidara, Itachi, Zetsu and Konan (who was gently trimming Zetsu's hair with a pair of hedge clippers) looked at him, surprised.

Itachi was the first to break the silence: "When did you get here?"

"He's like a ninja," Zetsu agreed, both versions looking extremely pleased with the joke.

Konan snipped a good chunk of his hair off. "Shut up, Zetsu," they chorused.

* * *

Deidara's always known that Sasori was stoic –he'd heard that the real reason Orochimaru had left was because after he'd showed off one of his awesome new jutsus to the puppet master, all he'd gotten was an unimpressed, Uchiha-inspired 'Hn'- but this was fucking ridiculous.

"Danna," he tried again. "Your room smells like Itachi's fanclub found it, yeah."

Sasori barely glanced up from his perch on the explosion of flowers, where he was busily dismembering petals. Dressed in a white robe with his feet tucked under him, he looked like a cotton ball with a smear of blood at the top. Which was a pretty pleasing portrayal of his partner, considering.

"These make excellent holders," Sasori demonstrated with a rose, gently drawing out the senbon hidden within it. The tip glowed purple with Sasori's preferred poison, and it fitted against the crimson of the rose like puzzle pieces.

It was, in a word, beautiful. In three words- absolutely fucking amazing. In fifty words- brilliant enough to make him want to tackle-hug his partner and push him down, blow up the wonderland around them so that for a second it would be soft petals and Sasori's wide eyes and absolute chaos raining over their bodies so viscerally that Sasori would forget all his misconceptions of eternity and finally _see_.

Deidara blinked. What was _in_ that cereal?

He wasn't denying that it would be eminently satisfying to push Sasori to the ground and shove some humanity into him by force. He's been tempted more than once. Only the knowledge that Sasori would undoubtedly turn around and make him into a puppet faster than he could say 'artisanexplosionyeah' stopped him.

If nothing else, Deidara was learning caution from his great Akatsuki experience.

"Not that I don't like it, danna," he said cautiously, "but what brought this on?"

"I already told you." Sasori was testing a mechanism that made a daisy open razor-sharp petals at the yank of a chakra string. "Hidan-"

"-is putting the moves on you like it was going out of style, yeah, I got that," Deidara scowled. "And then you, being you, decided that flowers were the awesomest thing that ever awesomed and made them into instruments of torture, which, by the way, are really, really cool, yeah. What I don't get is, what made Hidan look at you this morning and think that pre-pubescent redheads were his type? You've been living together for, like, forever, yeah?"

Sasori actually looked up, but only to pick up his scalpel. He advanced towards Deidara with a blank expression. Deidara refused to back down.

"You're contradicting yourself," Sasori said mildly. He picked up a vase full of flowers from immediately behind Deidara, who had begun, in all honesty, to shake a little. Anyone with even the faint slivers of sanity he had knew that bad shit could go down when Sasori was holding a scalpel. He tried not to look too relieved when Sasori drew back, drifting back towards his throne of roses.

"Wh- what do you mean, yeah?"

"I'm thirty-two years old," Sasori said, climbing on to the chair. He huddled into himself and began counting petals, and the end result of him looking tiny and adorable was probably the by-product of an evil genius mind at work. "And Hidan wasn't, as you say, putting the moves on me."

Deidara blinked. "Say what?"

"He was merely trying to teach me how to express my affection for my partner." Sasori paused. "That's you," he added drily.

Deidara took a minute to process this. Sasori went back to making colorful deathtraps, looking unperturbed.

Then, a slow grin broke across Deidara's face. "Danna. Does that mean you _loooove_ me, yeah?"

Sasori looked up at him seriously. "Not enough not to stab you with this senbon of you try to hug me, but yes."

Deidara ignored him. "Aw, come here, you little fuzzball."

"I strongly protest," came Sasori's muffled reply as Deidara mushed him against his chest, holding him senbon-side up so that he wouldn't get inconveniently stabbed. "Deidara. I can and will kill you in your sleep. Deidara."

"You act like you can't stand me, but deep in your heart, you have _feeeelings_ for me, don't you, danna?" Deidara sang, dodging a swipe of a kunai that had appeared out of nowhere. "If I died, you would cry and sing sad songs in front of my grave, yeah?"

"I thought you'd want to be cremated," Sasori's voice sounded like he was choking.

Deidara almost felt guilty before he remembered that Sasori didn't actually need air. "Yep. Going out with a bang, that's me."

Itachi, who had been passing their room, commented, "That's what your mom said."

Deidara uttered a war cry and pushed Sasori aside. "I'm gonna fuck you up so bad, Uchiha, they're gonna need your fucking sharingan to identify your body!"

Sasori perceived that a long drawn-out battle that would involve exploding clay chickens and genjutsu visions of Orochimaru posing naked was about to follow. He drew out two handfuls of senbon and threw each at Deidara and Itachi, paying vague attention not to hit any of their vitals.

Before Deidara passed out, he mumbled drunkenly, "Love you too, danna."

"Thank you," Sasori said.

Deidara's head slumped back, his breathing growing slow and heavy. Sasori turned back to his flowers.

Like he always privately believed, every problem had an Akasuna no Sasori solution.

* * *

A/N: Written in a mad, sleep-deprived hour. Reviews are love.


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